As I see it there are both good and bad points to Faction Trees,
these are being rather confused with direct questions of who
owes loyalty to whome.

On the plus side, having loyalities to someone other than the
faction head will mean that your empire breaks up nicely. I
personally play about three or four different groups that
are relitivly independant, but get central funding :->

If you want to build up a large faction, then your going to
have to spend a lot of time messing about keeping up with
your subordinates. On the other hand lots of people don't
want this complexity.

What I want is for the indervidual to count for more/groups to
be harder to come by.

One of the nice features of olympia is that you can specialise
in a certain area. On the other hand the only way to ensure
survival is to keep a reasonably large faction about. There is
really very little point in having a single person with combat-10.

This was the problem I had with the heir system in the first place.
And I suppose an argument in favour of faction trees with loyality
that decreased the longer the bits went without seeing you. I you
want to run an empire, its going to have to cut into your study
time...

Sorry if this has been a little disjointed, but its a group
of my opinions on various subjects in this area.